What am I?

So I've been reading about different terms and it seems like "Atheist" refers to someone who is DEFINITELY positive that no God or other supernatural beings exist. So I'm not sure if I would qualify as an atheist or not... Here is what I believe that could make me not be an atheist:

-I believe that nobody (including myself) is ever 100% correct in the general sense. You can be 100% certain something is true from your perspective, but never from the 'general' or 3rd person perspective.

-I believe that similar to how most animals don't have contentiousness and comprehend reality differently then we do, we are limited to the reality we can comprehend and hence we can never really understand what reality/existence really is.

-Since where we come from, meaning of life, our creator/creation/existence, etc. is not comprehend-able by us any idea is a good idea, so as long as you don't say you're 100% sure, then you are correct and should believe in whatever keeps you motivated.

Well, it doesn't make you a 'believer' but basically ANY idea even Tadder Tot could technically exist when viewing existence from a neutral perspective, I mean how can you prove that it doesn't if you haven't been EVERYWHERE that EVER existed? BUT the chances are so astronomically low (just like the idea of god) - which actually makes you PERSONALLY a non-believer based on the results. So you can make the personal decision that in your reality god doesn't exist 100% but can you say that it is a 100% fact not just in your opinion, but as general knowledge?

umm okay then is it also fair to ask.. where does one fit if one rejects this popular notion of god but believes that there is another version of "power" (for the lack of a better word) that may be within... as in what if i am "god"

besides.. is there a necessity to conform to a label? can i just be a "rejectionist" ?

That's a good question too, does atheism specifically mean not believing in 'God' as a person who judges you, puts in you in heaven/hell sort of thing, or does it mean believing in absolutely nothing? I mean, (weird example, but) what about if someone believes he will exist still after death inside the maggots and vermin who eat them...? Would that still count as atheism?

One of the necessary presuppositions of physics is that information never disappears from the universe. To a physicist or cosmologist, "information" is a specific jargon term. It is not the term as used by average people in everyday life and it is also different from the term as used in, for example, the information sciences.

To a physicist or cosmologist, information is the stuff that physical reality is made of. Stephen Hawking decades ago showed that black holes slowly evaporate. What of all of the matter that the black hole had accumulated, then? At the time, Hawking said it appeared that it was lost forever, which set up what has been called The Hawking Paradox.

You see, one presupposition you need in order to make explanations and predictions with confidence in physics and cosmology is that the amount of stuff in the universe is a constant. You can't have it just up and disappearing from the universe, because then, as more than one physicist has put it in a variety of ways, anything is possible. When anything is possible, no prediction can be made with confidence.

And yet, physicists do make predictions that seem to work reliably. And when they fail, there is a reason why they fail. In other words, things seem to work as expected.

Other leading physicists, chief among them Leonard Susskind, saw the problem and decided to find a way out of the paradox. Eventually, under the pressure of their criticism, Hawking said he thought he had found a way out of the paradox in the form of the slow "leakage" of information from black holes. So, that made black holes a lot more like a puddle evaporating, where when the water evaporates from the puddle, it isn't gone, it's just no longer in the puddle, having undergone a change of form in the process.

When we die, we aren't gone in any physical sense. We have just changed form.

Haha, exactly, that's actually the topic I was referring to but didn't want to get into it much - at the end of the day, if you find importance in the fact that you still exist in some form after death, does that still make you an atheist?

How about this - what if you believe all that, but also believe because reality is not fully defined and you are limited to your 5 senses, there may be other realms within existence different to what we are used to, different then anything we can possibly comprehend with your consciousness. Perhaps trees do have a greater sense of existence that we simply cannot comprehend due to our current physical limits. Let's say you also believe that after you die - even though you won't be the same, there is a small chance there is other ways you can be 'alive' (not as we define it), but still within existence and exist in a completely different state then the way you are perceiving reality now. Would that still make you an atheist?

I just think that things begin to get interesting once you admit the fact that the way you comprehend reality is only limited to your senses and judgment which can be a VERY different then then what reality is. Then you just place your bet on the most logical story to you and let it ride! Currently I'm trying to figure out where to place my bet :)

To me, it sounds like you're rejecting the ability to use your senses. Have you seen/ heard/ smelled/ touched/ tasted "God"? I'm guessing not. That, to me, is grounds enough to say that "He" did/does not exist.To say that everything is inherently unknowable, even if you can know it 99.99999%, that .00001% you are rejecting that percentage from your reality. Because you are afraid of retribution, either by "God" or by your religious peers, you are willing to admit the possibility of the existence of something your senses tell you does not exist. That is, at it's core, a rejection of reality, and, even though I may be the only one who thinks like this, the stepping stones to insanity. The teachings of a schizophrenic desert tribesman who likely also suffered from dehydration and heat stroke cannot be trusted anymore than the teachings of a man in a psychological ward at a prison hospital who killed people, and hates people, because a few voices in his head, and a few hallucinations told him that was the only possible way to live a good life and be saved after he was dead.

The claim that there is a God is a lot different from the claim that there is a dog. You can touch and smell and hear a dog to verify that here is an animal that looks like a dog, barks like a dog, and fetches sticks.

What battery of sensory phenomena could verify God's existence? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof," as they say. And the claims made for God are almost if not entirely too extraordinarily to imagine they could be verified.

Whoa, whoa, whoa ... I don't think you have to "sense" something to hold a legitimate belief in its existence. I have never sensed a quark, but I believe they exist. I think it is more a matter of evidence, whether collected directly by the human senses or through other rational means.

To interpret evidence collected through rational means, you would have to use your senses would you not? Therefore, you would be using your senses to collect the data. When I say sense, I mean to use your senses, not ESP or telepathy or other-worldly message. To be fair, any time you touch something, even air, you would be sensing quarks, as quarks make up the atoms in which you are living. You are quite literally made of quarks, therefore, you have sensed them.

We appear to have different definitions of the word "sense." I do not think I can sense quarks, no.

Try these:

Hannibal crossed the Alps with his war elephants in 218 BC.

e raised to the power of i x pi, plus one, equals zero (Euler's identity).

The universe is expanding.

I cannot "sense" any of these, yet I still believe they are true -- based on the evidence for them.

If you want to suggest that I am "sensing" these things when I read or think about them, then by the same definition isn't the Christian "sensing" their truth when they read the Bible or listen to a preacher?

I don't think my senses can tell me when something doesn't exist. Only my reason can do that.